


babe, there's something lonesome about you

by alchemystique



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 14:45:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4183809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemystique/pseuds/alchemystique
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a spot, just between Owen’s neck and his collarbone, that she’s become intimately familiar with in the past few weeks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	babe, there's something lonesome about you

**Author's Note:**

> Previously "like real people do".

There’s a spot, just between Owen’s neck and his collarbone, that she’s become intimately familiar with in the past few weeks. 

It’s become a habit to slip into the room she’d offered up for him, when the sky is dark and she’s tossed and turned in her own bed for hours, before she gives up on sleep and pads down the hallway to the second door on her left.

Once upon a time, she’d imagined that room would house a crib, a child, and it’s been a long time since she’s thought of such things, but they come back to her now, when Owen pulls up the duvet and she slides over the mattress, tangling her legs in the sheets as he curls his arm around her neck and pulls her into him. Her nose fits into that little crook with ease, and she exhales against his neck, waiting for the tremors in her body to still, as they always do when she’s pressed against his side. 

“Nightmare?” he asks, his voice thick with the same tiredness she feels in her bones, and she shakes her head, her lashes fluttering across the tendons of his neck.   


He presses his mouth into the crown of her hair, not quite a kiss but not entirely platonic either, and she waits for his breathing to even out, for the stillness of sleep to overcome her. The room is dark, and her house is silent, and for a moment she can pretend that the world around her hasn’t irrevocably changed.

\------

She wakes from the dream out of breath, and waits in the still silence to see if she’s called out - the first night in her own bed she hadn’t slept a wink, but tonight Owen is down the hall, and she wonders if she’s woken him. 

She slips down the hall in her threadbare tee shirt, eyes adjusting to the dark hallway - it’s been so long since she’s spent any time here that her body doesn’t quite remember the creaking board halfway down, doesn’t remember the exact number of steps necessary to reach the spare room, and her hands dip along the running board until she reaches the frame of the door.

There is a hazy light shining beyond the crack in the door, and when she shakes her head and turns to leave, to return to her bed and set aside this sudden, uncharacteristic need for companionship, his voice calls out. “Claire?” 

She pauses, unsure, before she pushes forward, poking her head carefully around the frame and into the room. 

He’s propped up in bed, a pile of pillows behind him, his phone shining against his face, casting sharp shadows along his nose and cheek, the hood of his eyes. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she tells him, and he frowns, eyes cutting to her. They dart to the exposed span of her legs under the tee before they return to her face, and she’s glad, at least, that some things will never change.   


“Wasn’t sleeping,” he tells her, and lets the phone slide into his lap.   


“Did I...” she lets the question fall unfinished, eyeing the dusting of hair across his broad chest, the pull of muscle in his arms as he leans forward. “Nevermind. I just...” She’s dreading returning to her room already, feels like an idiot for ever making the trek down the hall. “Goodnight, Owen.”

Her hasty retreat is cut short by his voice calling her name out again. She expects a joke, a clever innuendo, perhaps, something to ease the tension and make light of her desperate need for human contact at four in the morning from a man she’s barely let out of her sight since the island. Distance is a thing she’s very bad at, when she gets attached. It’s why she’s always tried so hard to maintain it.

“You wanna keep me company?” he asks, and she’s grateful for the way his mouth quirks up, self-deprecating in that way he has, like she’d be the one doing him a favor. She sighs, eyes the hand he drops to pat at the bed.   


Just this once won’t hurt, she tells herself as she pads into the room, her feet sliding along the hardwood until the reach the edge of the bed. 

She crawls up next to him, careful not to touch him as she pulls at the blanket on the edge of the bed, feeling his eyes follow its progress up her bare legs. 

“I only bite on request,” he tells her when she turns to look at him. His phone has gone dark, and the only light comes from the low hanging moon casting shadows from outside. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and forces herself not to startle when he shifts in the bed, yanking one of the pillows out from behind his head to tuck behind her. His hand brushes the skin of her elbow, and she can imagine the way that hand had felt cradling her elbow as he pulled her close to catch her lips, heavy calluses on the tips of his fingers and a soft palm tucked against her.   


She huffs at his words, sliding down on the bed until her head hits the pillow. “You should get some sleep,” she tells him, watching the way the shadows play across his face as a breeze rustles the tree outside.

“Is that a demand, or are you requesting a cuddle buddy?”  


She’s been hesitant since she wandered out of her own room, but the rough edges of his voice make her bold, and she curves her fingers around his arm, sliding through soft hair. Goosebumps break out on his skin, and his head tilts down to meet her gaze. “Both.”

He’s far less hesitant than she is, rolling fully on to his side to slide a hand around her middle, his fingers splaying against her back as he slides his other arm beneath her raised head. Muscles bunch and stretch as he gets comfortable, his head pressing into the mountain of pillows until he finds a good spot, and she hums low in her throat when his fingers trace a path across her back, dancing lightly along her spine. 

Her eyes flutter closed as her head rolls towards the crook of her shoulder, and she breathes in deep, letting the thrum of his pulse echo against her cheek. 

She’s fairly certain neither one of them actually sleeps, but she blinks her eyes open as the sun creeps over the edge of the window, feeling more rested than she has in the week since they left Isla Nublar, the beat of his heart against her palm steady as he lets his gaze hold hers. 

\------

In waking hours they don’t speak of it, but it’s on her mind more often than she cares to admit. Owen has gone from minor annoyance to a lifeline, since Indominous, and sometimes, when she’s in the midst of meetings with lawyers and trips to the therapist, the memory of his breath against her ear and the splay of his fingers along her side is the only thing that stops her from having a panic attack. 

Her life is a mess - every bit of organization she has feels as though it’s been scattered to the winds, every memo and meeting and appointment feels as though it has taken a stranglehold and won’t let go. She’s holding it together with frayed string, but the only person she’s willing to let show it is the one who seems to think nothing has changed. 

He has more faith in her than she ever gave him credit for. 

The first time he mentions the friend from the navy who lives an hour away, she swallows her tongue and stares at him and hopes to god he understands how very much she doesn’t want him to leave as she nods and manages to tell him she understands if he doesn’t feel comfortable staying here.

He doesn’t bring it up again, and she’s happy to pretend that what they’re doing here is both healthy and normal. 

\------

He complains about her health-nut food the night before his interview airs, and instead of letting it bother her she digs her wallet out and tells him to go buy whatever crap he needs to sustain himself. 

He looks like she’s just danced naked around her living room, but he takes her credit card anyway and comes back an hour later with enough food to feed an army. 

After that he makes dinner for them almost every night - Claire tells him it’s not necessary but he insists his freeloading should have some return on investment, so she lets him. She’s not surprised, exactly, to find that he’s a great cook, but it’s strange to come home from Masrani Global to the smells of sauteing vegetables and to die for sauces. Claire could burn water if pressed, and the last time she had someone cook for her she’d been a much different person. The kind who didn’t question a smiling man humming to himself in her kitchen as he broiled marinated chicken and twirled her under his arm when she greeted him at the threshold. The kind who didn’t keep her heart under lock and key, who believed she could have the career and the husband and the family. 

Sometimes Owen smiles across the table as he gives her shit about something, telling her about his last Skype call with Gray and complaining about the meme that’s popped up from his Brokaw interview, and she has to tamp down on the feeling that she _could_ have all of that.

She spends a few sleepless nights avoiding the circle of his arms, just to prove a point to herself. 

When Owen crawls into her bed on the third night, grunting as he presses his face into her stomach and wraps an arm around her hip, she gives up any hope that she’ll be able to keep fighting this forever.

\------

The tequila is a bad idea. But as she’s driving back to her house after quitting the job she’d devoted so much of her life to, her mind drifts to that awful date - and then to that time before it, when she’d flirted eagerly back and been cautiously smitten with the raptor handler who showed such a keen interest in her. She’d sabotaged the date - she’d known exactly how much it would aggravate Mr. Free Spirit to have a set schedule, had known exactly what buttons to push and what things to say to keep things from going well. She’d been terrified of a repeat of Andrew, the fiance who’d called off their wedding because she spent too much time at work, she never let loose, she didn’t know how to give up a little control. It had been a manipulative test and they’d both failed miserably.

But she’d just quit her job, in part because Masrani had decided that Owen’s interview was something they needed to put a PR spin on (mostly because she couldn’t sit back and watch them repeat their mistakes for a third time), and what little control she’d had left should have gone straight into a tailspin, but she felt - free, calm, for the first time since that warning beacon had gone off in the Indominous paddock.

And she felt like celebrating.

\------

The urge to kiss him is almost unbearable the entire night - every time their gazes catch it’s like a fire has been lit in her chest, and her skin feels tight across her muscles, her body thrums every time he laughs, every time he presses close or admits some morsel of his past. 

She won’t let herself. The adrenaline of the day has done strange things to her, and she knows once she crashes she’ll want to reassess, but the pull of him, of falling into it after denying herself so long - 

For once she hates the control her brain has over her body. 

\------

She calls Karen instead of going to the appointment she has scheduled with a therapist, and it all comes out of her in a rush - all the regrets she has about Andrew, all the time she’s wasted with Owen, the crushing defeat of the park and the fact that she still has nightmares that her nephews don’t make it out alive.

“Andrew was an asshole who couldn’t deal with you being more successful than he was. You were lucky to be rid of him.” Karen pauses, and Claire can’t decide how she feels about her newly-divorced sister. “Are you...worried Owen is going to be the same?”  


Claire shrugs, doesn’t answer. Her sister can’t see her, but Karen can read each individual breath of quiet like it’s own novel. 

“I think you need to start taking more risks, in your life, Claire. And I definitely think you need to have hot, sweaty sex on every surface of your house with that man.”  


“Karen!” Claire says, slightly scandalized by the words, if only because they’re coming out of her sisters mouth.   


“I’m a free woman now, Claire. And if you don’t jump on that, someone else will. But if it makes any difference, when I pretend I’m not eavesdropping on the boys Skype sessions with him, all I ever hear him talk about is you. So. Maybe think about it?”  


\------

She doesn’t think about it. She drives straight home, pushes through the front doors, ignoring the burnt smell wafting from her kitchen and the draft from the back door, to find him leaning over a laptop watching...a youtube video of Bear McCreary.

She’s seen stranger things. “What do you think of Taming The Wild Beast with Owen Grady?” he asks, and she eyes the pull of his shoulders across a too tight tee shirt, the way his hair curls over his ears, the scruff of his beard as he turns half in his seat. 

“Let’s go out.” She hates the words the moment they are out of her mouth, and his attention is still half focused on the screen. 

“Yeah, sorry, I kinda burnt dinner.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She has to stop herself from squirming uncomfortably, shoving all of her weight onto the ball of one foot.

“Well, color me confused.” 

“On a date,” she rushes through, color rising in her cheeks.  


His shocked look doesn’t help at all. A thousand scenarios flash before her mind, and in all of them, she’s been reading the situation wrong. “What, like, now?”

She’s already retreating. It had been an awful idea, horribly executed, and the very real possibility that he’s not interested hadn’t struck her until now. She backpedals, mind whirring over the sudden likelihood that she’s ruined the strange balance of their friendship forever, that this will make things uncomfortable enough for him to leave. 

She’ll survive the fallout, she knows she will. But it’s gonna hurt like a bitch.

“Nevermind. Forget I said anything.”  


“Woah,” his hand goes up, like she’d seen it to a million times before with the raptors, “no no no. You just asked me out, we’re not letting that go without remark.”   


Claire forces her gaze to the space behind his shoulder, her skin crawling as she attempts to find any exit plan. “You’re obviously not interested, so.” The sentence goes unfinished, hanging, and he snaps his jaw shut with a click loud enough to make her eyes meet his. 

“What the hell would make you think I wasn’t interested?” The speech that follows makes her swallow heavily, his gaze sincere and his words full of more weight than she’s entirely sure she was prepared for, but half an hour later they’re eating street tacos on a park bench, his grin wide as they play footsie under the table like a pair of lovestruck teenagers.  


\------

Owen becomes increasingly more confused by the random pictures Claire takes of the house, and Karen’s texts become increasingly more raunchy until Owen finally realizes what it going on. 

He texts her a link to a porn sight and tells her to get her own sex life, thank you very much.

\------

He asks her to marry him on a Sunday. The house is quiet, the sun has not quite tipped over the edge of the horizon, and they’d spent the night reacquainting themselves after a week-long trip that had sent Claire to the other side of the country. Her nose is pressed to the hollow where neck meets shoulder, his fingers tracing warm circles on her arm, and when he drags her in for a sloppy kiss she smiles against his lips.

“We should get married,” he says, and she’d be indignant, if she could still feel her legs. Just to annoy him, she shrugs in response, curling her face up under his chin to press a kiss to his adams apple. “I’m being serious, Claire.” Though she doesn’t actually need the clarification, she hums against his skin in response.

“Okay.”  


“What, not even a single happy tear? Maybe I don’t want to marry you at all.”  


“Well, that’s disappointing. I had plans to do that thing you like.” Her foot skims his calf as she hitches her leg up his body a bit. “But if you’re not interested...”  


He groans as he rolls her under him, pinning her arms carefully above her head, and she laughs, bright and happy, until he swallows the noise against his lips.

\------

 _Your boyfriend is a menace, and I’m never letting you stay in my house again, you disgusting horndog,_ the text from her sister reads, and she turns her gaze to Owen, who chuckles low and deep as he slides his phone across to her. 

His last sent message is to Karen _. Getting married, so I guess that’s cool._

Below it is a picture of the kitchen island in Karen’s house, and Claire blushes to the roots of her hair when Owen’s bellow of laughter cuts through the living room.


End file.
